


Bird Watching Club

by AshsHorrorShow



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, Jonathan Likes His Birds, Oswald Is An Ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-22 00:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11369175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshsHorrorShow/pseuds/AshsHorrorShow
Summary: All Oswald wanted was his club to have a few dedicated members that he could enjoy watching birds with. Was that really so much to ask for?





	Bird Watching Club

Oswald Cobblepot had known right from the beginning that his club was probably not going to get a lot of members. After all, bird-watching was a rather niche interest, and he knew most of his peers were too rowdy and hyper to truly appreciate the art. But he was fine with that. He didn’t need to be like Edward Nygma, who seemed to always find the overwhelming need to tell people about how many members his Science/Robotics Club had. As long as he had a couple dedicated members, he would’ve been happy. 

So forgive him if he sounded ungrateful, but he had honestly expected at least more than one pissing member!

Oswald was flabbergasted. He had thought at the very least he would get three members! But he’d been sitting in the school library for hours now and no one else had walked through the door looking for the club. Was this a fluke? A mistake? He somehow doubted it. The elaborate posters he’d hung around the school had been very thorough in explaining where and when the first club meeting would be held. No other people had come and said they would be absent for this particular meeting or anything of the like either…

Oswald groaned in dismay and ran his fingers through his greasy black hair as he came to the realization that his Bird Watching Club he had been so excited about creating all summer might only really have two members, him being one of them.

This realization was a bitter enough pill to swallow… but it got worse. The only other member of his club was Jonathan fucking Crane.

Oswald admittedly did not have the highest opinion of Jonathan Crane. The two of them had never spoken much, as Jon was in different classes than him and the loner was a bit of a quiet kid anyway. But even with the limited interaction the two of them had, Oswald could safely say he found Jonathan to be the creepiest person he had ever met.

Fitting too because Jonathan even looked creepy. From his gangly, too thin limbs that reminded Oswald of the branches of spindly dead trees, to his hauntingly blue eyes that never failed to make Oswald’s blood run ice-cold whenever he looked at them directly. The kid’s neutral expression seemed to be a deep scowl and when one added that with his ugly features, the boy had the appearance of a creepy old man. The kid was rail-thin and looked like a skeleton who decided to put human skin on, adding to his overall unsettling appearance. 

Plus, he was way too tall for his own good and Oswald had never liked tall people. 

But even with looks aside, Jonathan just made Oswald feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was the fact the boy was so quiet that it just made him even more unsettling than usual … or the fact that whenever someone talked Jonathan would stare at them unblinkingly, like some kind of owl or cat, as if he was trying to look into their soul. The boy’s voice was low and almost detached… and when you added that to the fact that Jon seemed to have an almost creepy obsession with the subject of horror and other dark things. He was unsettling.

Even now, he could barely stand to look at the other kid and Jonathan wasn’t even doing anything. He was just sitting there with a bored expression on his face (probably from having to sit there for hours with basically no word from Oswald), drumming his spindly fingers absent-mindedly along the library table. His fingers were so thin and gnarled they looked like claws. Oswald repressed a shiver. 

So instead of looking at Jonathan, he decided to look at the door some more… hoping desperately that someone else just happened to be very, very late or something… but it seemed that was not the case.

Finally, Jonathan’s voice broke him out of his stupor. 

“Oi, are we ever going to do anything here? Great Grandma Keeny doesn’t like me being gone for too long and I got chores to finish…”

Oswald flinched. Jonathan hadn’t spoken this whole time, so his voice came out of nowhere. Once he recovered from that mini heart attack, he confusedly tried to figure out what Jonathan was talking about when he remembered that Jonathan was a farmer boy. He lived with his wrinkly old grandmother, who also looked very creepy. According to his mother, apparently the Keeny family had once been a great family name, but now they were basically broke… which would explain why Jonathan looked like he shopped at the local dumpster for clothes.

Great… he could tell he was going to be able to relate with this welfare kid a whole lot.

Well, it couldn’t be helped. If Jonathan was the only one interested, so be it. At least he would know how to be quiet so he wouldn’t scare away the birds… at least if they didn’t spot his head over the trees… which was highly likely.

Sighing in defeat, Oswald quickly detailed where and when they would have their first meeting and just prayed that this didn’t end up way too much of a failure.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He must have pissed off some sort of entity somehow… because not only did his club not get hardly any members… but this first official expedition was going absolutely terrible!

They had been walking around these woods for hours now, pausing momentarily every so often to look for anything… but they had not found one single bird. Oswald couldn’t help but feel somewhat ripped off. All he had wanted was to see birds naturally in the wild. Not by artificial means like a bird feeder or something… just pure unadulterated bird action. And supposedly, these woods had some specific breeds of birds not often seen in the city. Oswald had brought his bird book and everything for this event to help identify them… but so far they had yet to hear even a birdcall.

Part of Oswald wanted to blame Jonathan for it for some reason. Maybe the fact the kid was so tall that a bird from miles away could see him probably, or perhaps his footsteps were causing too much noise. However, arguing with Jon would cause too much noise and they were over here trying to avoid noise.

To his credit, Jonathan had been silent this whole entire expedition … not once complaining and dutifully looking around for birds… but that also kind of pissed Oswald off because he was so bored part of him wanted to hear even the slightest bit of noise. The silence was killing him.

But he just continued to walk until finally, he came to a spot in an open area and put on his binoculars, hoping to see a bird hiding among the leaves of the trees. 

His desperate search was turning out uneventful when suddenly, he heard Jon whisper, “Bird.”

Oswald flinched at that and looked around desperately, hissing excitedly, “Where, where?!”

Jonathan’s long finger pointed over in the distance. Oswald squinted to see what in the world was looking at and was greeted with the sight of… a crow. A plain, ordinary boring crow that was just pecking away at something invisible on the ground.

Oswald couldn’t help the anger that burst through him. Spitting in disgust, he said, “I was kind of looking for a bird that I don’t see every day in the city, Jonathan.”

Jonathan actually looked somewhat offended at that and said, “Hey, crows are very smart birds. You can train them to do all sorts of tricks and I actually got a crow once to deal with a kid who I personally disliked and-”

Oswald just let him yammer on, not wanting to pay attention. It only made sense a creepy kid like Jon would like a boring scavenger like a crow or raven. Probably fit his Poe aesthetic or something. 

Jonathan must have noticed he long since stopped paying attention as he scowled at him, but thankfully, he moved along with Oswald when he began trekking forward. Oswald didn’t need to be responsible for losing the dumbass in the woods just because he had made the other kid huffy.

Unfortunately though, it seemed he invoked Jonathan’s ire because as they were walking and Oswald was busy trying to find some other bird that existed in these seemingly barren woods, Jonathan would constantly interrupt him by saying, “Bird.” Only to be pointing to a crow again, which never failed to make Oswald mad. What made it even more infuriating was that every time he fell for it, Jon would smirk like he was oh so fucking clever. Oswald honestly thought about slugging the kid more than once, but he also didn’t want to get his throat slit in the middle of the night with a scythe so he held off, instead just marching off hoping he would find some kind of cool bird that would make this whole miserable experience at least somewhat worth it.

Unfortunately, hours later, that did not seem to be the case. Jonathan somehow kept spotting more and more crows… but Oswald couldn’t catch sight of a single interesting bird. Wanting to take a break and internally weep, Oswald slouched against a tree and glared at the ground, cursing his rotten luck and considering yelling at the person who recommended these woods to him. 

While he was sulking, Jonathan began digging around in his large pants pockets. Oswald watched as he fished out small bags of bird seeds and he was about to snap at Jonathan that they were supposed to do this without help, before he decided not to bother. Who cared? Jonathan would probably just ignore him and besides, he doubted Jonathan would find anything anyway. He was pretty sure any bird species other than the crow were extinct. 

All of a sudden, the sounds of wings erupted into the air as long as a series of caws and suddenly a whole bunch of crows came out of the woodwork to come feed on the seeds that Jonathan was spreading on the ground. Oswald blinked in shock, looking at the number Jon had managed to collect. 

Apparently Jonathan had spread a few seeds on his shoulders and stuff as a couple of the birds landed on his shoulder. Jonathan was grinning genuinely for once… something Oswald never thought he would see. He watched as the gangly teen stretched out his arms more so more crows hopped on his arms to see if there was any food. Oswald couldn’t help but note the boy looked like an actual scarecrow in that position. 

Part of him wanted to get mad, but now that he was really looking at the birds… they were sort of cool. They had glossy feathers and they seemed to be sharing some of their food and Jonathan was able to move so naturally within them apparently as he began walking around them…

Leaning back, Oswald sighed in defeat and began watching the birds, figuring this was the best he was going to get it.

**Author's Note:**

> I always wondered how Jonathan and Oswald would get along since in many canons, both of them do enjoy birds. Then I thought about it a little more and thought, 'Not very much probably.' LOL. But through that thought-process I came up with this and voila. This came to be. 
> 
> Special, special, special thanks to my friend, [Doktor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DktrAgonizer/pseuds/DktrAgonizer) , for betaing this for me. Please check out her work and comment on it and send her lots and lots of love. Her Batman work especially is very good and quality.
> 
> As always critique is wanted and I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
